EA announcesitsnearlyannual list of online servers that are being shutdown (thanks Eurogamer). Word is The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth PC servers closed on December 31 as their licensing deal with Middle-earth Enterprises is expiring. They also announce The Sims Carnival will go offline on January 17, saying: "After January 16th 2011, you will not be able to access any content from The Sims Carnival. Any games that you may have created or modified or other content that you have created on the website will no longer be available to you. Also any embedded links to games on The Sims Carnival website will no longer function. We thank you for playing with us on The Sims Carnival. We hope you've enjoyed the site as much as we have and that we'll see you again in another great EA game!" Finally, they list a number of EA Sports game servers that will shutdown on February 8, with the closure of servers for Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09 for Wii to follow on March 1, offering the following explanation:

As background information, the EA SPORTS™ games scheduled for shutdown in February and March 2011 represent roughly 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles. Despite some people's perception, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these older games up and running. We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games. These decisions to retire games is never easy. The development teams and operational staff pour their hearts into these games almost as much as the customers playing them and it is hard to see one retired. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we appreciate your ongoing patronage.

I can't wait for the day when a game company gets created, where the leads and designers are gamers themselves, make games for the people, by the people, and shuts EA down for good. (along with their servers)Beancounters. But millions more will buy BF and Sims, so EA isn't going anywhere soon, but more up.